The road to ‘mainstreaming impact’

Lessons from the Mindful Money Conference and Awards 2024.

New Zealand’s impact investing community gathered at the Mindful Money Conference and Awards recently to discuss the challenges and opportunities present across this fledgling landscape.

Helen Bullick, who leads Craigs’ Specialised Wealth Advisory Team, attended the conference and awards, engaging in roundtable discussion with other delegates. Here, she shares some of her takeaways from the day:

• Impact investing involves targeting investments to generate positive and measurable social, cultural or environmental outcomes alongside financial returns for the investor.

• In many ways, New Zealand is at the forefront of innovations to solve society’s challenges in sustainable ways. Some of our strengths are relatively new, like our burgeoning space and ocean industries. Others are longstanding and uniquely ours, like the interconnected and intergenerational principles that influence Māori culture.

• In the social sphere, growing New Zealand’s pool of affordable homes could have far-reaching impacts. It is a challenge that is not easily solved but passionate people and organisations are mobilising resources – adopting a holistic approach that looks to policy makers, fund managers and private investors to work together to deploy capital. Build-to-rent is just one of the initiatives gaining traction. With the easing of restrictions around new builds, advocates are looking to more private investors to act.

• For the environment, continuing to scale New Zealand’s supply of renewable energy to increase network resilience and reduce carbon emissions is an imperative. Our renewable energy transition and the associated improvements required to our transmission network will require billions of dollars of investment. Energy storage, the role of solar, smarter energy usage and reducing energy demand overall are all very topical. Where infrastructure and technology companies have sometimes presented quite distinct investment opportunities, their shared role in facing this great challenge places both squarely in the sights of impact-focused investors.

• While there is much promise, most of the potential for private investors to participate remains untapped. The delegation cited the need for mechanisms to enable the flow of private capital into social and environmental investments. For individual investors, this might be achieved through changing the makeup of funds to focus more on targeted outcomes. For larger investors like iwi, foundations, community trusts and other charities, more innovative solutions are emerging that allow them to achieve their societal and environmental objectives in a way that does not compromise their financial sustainability.

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